15 Kasım 2014 Cumartesi

İlhan Berk - (There have been friends I made with trees)

THERE HAVE BEEN FRIENDS I MADE WITH TREES

"With names I filled the silence." I codified things. I know the childhood of
the sky, the trees. There have been friends I made with trees, there still
are. I did not understand the Milky Way. Nor the numbers. (The numbers
were pretending to be unfound as yet.) Only with eight (5+3), I became
intimate. (Well, who didn’t?) With zero, too, a little. (Finding zero has not
been easy.) Very bad things have been said for three. Why? I don’t know.
To know is a number. One more; I got to know one. One cannot think with
one. Some numbers were born guilty. One, is one of them. I loved stones
without understanding. No relationship could be established between the
name and the shape of pebbles. I could not find the past of black amber. So
be it. Mystery is everything. I could not decipher some consonants. (Spirit of
letters wanders around in consonants, American Indians know this.) I came
and went with birds. Birds don’t know the numbers, except the dragonfly. I
understood that horses do not dream in the East. (Horses do weep in Homer.)
I saw the mountains while walking. Mountains were thinking while walking. To
get to know stops reason. "The world is ours!" the snails were talking amongst
themselves, I cannot say I understood. Nor I did not understand. One should
read the snails.

As you speak of rivers, talking rivers, grasses in your eyes. Time is a
projection. Write this down somewhere. It is not true that spirit does not
have a window facing out. Christ’s ghost is still roaming around on earth.
(Only asking. One writes only to ask.) One who does not know one’s youth,
stumbles in the morning. Rose exists with its name. Stone got its name when
its face was found. (That is why stones keep turning around in the palms of the
masons.)

I want to turn to your eyes. And then... There is nothing called "then." Then, is
out of history.

İlhan Berk - (18 November 1918 – 28 August 2008) was a leading contemporary Turkish poet.